Deeplinks Blog posts about International

Sudan may not have "pulled a Mubarak" and shut off the Internet, but that hasn't stopped the government's attempts to silence vocal citizens online. Four days after we first reported his arrest, Usamah Mohammed Ali (better known as @simsimt) remains in detention, his whereabouts unknown, while Maha El-Sanosi was released over the weekend only to be arrested again today.

Several years ago, a professor at Holland's Radboud University Nijmegen, Dr. Bart Jacobs, landed in legal trouble. He'd attempted to publish an article exposing security flaws in the widely used MIFARE Classic wireless smart card chip, which is employed by transit systems around the world. Using an ordinary laptop, he was able to clone paying customers' cards to access transit systems for free. The point of his research was to demonstrate that the cards were vulnerable to attack.

The chip's owner, NXP Semiconductors, argued that it would have been irresponsible to make this information public. But a Dutch court ultimately ruled that clamping down on his research would have violated the scientist's rights to freedom of expression.

On Thursday, the fifth and final European Union Parliamentary committee voted to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). This signifies a major blow to ACTA, but its standing in the EU still comes down to the European Parliament vote scheduled during the first week of July. After this final vote decides the agreement’s adoption in Europe, however, the future of ACTA for the rest of the signatory countries unfortunately remains cloudy.

The decision faced by dictators to shut off the Internet (and risk economic loss) or keep their citizens online (and risk an Internet-assisted revolt) has been referred to by some as the "dictator's dilemma." In the case of Sudan, where anti-austerity protests have been raging for five days and calls to overthrow the regime have been reported, the dictator's decision is made a bit easier by the fact that only about one in ten citizens has access to the Internet.1